Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia | Page 2

which the young
Polish beauty was attending she suddenly disappeared. Outside the
house the lover waited with his sledge. They sped away, and were
married at the first church they reached.
The bride, with her father's curse upon her, passed straight from her
sheltered existence in her luxurious home to all the unsparing rigours of
Russian camp-life. Bred in an atmosphere of maternal tenderness and
Polish refinement she had now to share the life of her rough, uncultured
Russian husband, to content herself with the shallow society of the
wives of the camp officers, and soon to be crushed by the knowledge

that the man for whom she had sacrificed everything was not even
faithful to her.
During their travels, in 1821, Nicholas Nekrassov the future poet was
born, and three years later his father left military service and settled in
his estate in the Yaroslav Province, on the banks of the great river
Volga, and close to the Vladimirsky highway, famous in Russian
history as the road along which, for centuries, chained convicts had
been driven from European Russia to the mines in Siberia. The old park
of the manor, with its seven rippling brooklets and mysterious shadowy
linden avenues more than a century old, filled with a dreamy murmur at
the slightest stir of the breeze, stretched down to the mighty Volga,
along the banks of which, during the long summer days, were heard the
piteous, panting songs of the burlaki, the barge-towers, who drag the
heavy, loaded barges up and down the river.
The rattling of the convicts' chains as they passed; the songs of the
burlaki; the pale, sorrowful face of his mother as she walked alone in
the linden avenues of the garden, often shedding tears over a letter she
read, which was headed by a coronet and written in a fine, delicate
hand; the spreading green fields, the broad mighty river, the deep blue
skies of Russia,--such were the reminiscences which Nekrassov
retained from his earliest childhood. He loved his sad young mother
with a childish passion, and in after years he was wont to relate how
jealous he had been of that letter[1] she read so often, which always
seemed to fill her with a sorrow he could not understand, making her at
moments even forget that he was near her.
The sight and knowledge of deep human suffering, framed in the soft
voluptuous beauty of nature in central Russia, could not fail to sow the
seed of future poetical powers in the soul of an emotional child. His
mother, who had been bred on Shakespeare, Milton, and the other great
poets and writers of the West, devoted her solitary life to the
development of higher intellectual tendencies in her gifted little son.
And from an early age he made attempts at verse. His mother has
preserved for the world his first little poem, which he presented to her
when he was seven years of age, with a little heading, roughly to the

following effect:
My darling Mother, look at this,
I did the best I could in it,
Please
read it through and tell me if
You think there's any good in it.
The early life of the little Nekrassov was passed amid a series of
contrasting pictures. His father, when he had abandoned his military
calling and settled upon his estate, became the Chief of the district
police. He would take his son Nicholas with him in his trap as he drove
from village to village in the fulfilment of his new duties. The continual
change of scenery during their frequent journeys along country roads,
through forests and valleys, past meadows and rivers, the various types
of people they met with, broadened and developed the mind of little
Nekrassov, just as the mind of the child Ruskin was formed and
expanded during his journeys with his father. But Ruskin's education
lacked features with which young Nekrassov on his journeys soon
became familiar. While acquiring knowledge of life and accumulating
impressions of the beauties of nature, Nekrassov listened, perforce, to
the brutal, blustering speeches addressed by his father to the helpless,
trembling peasants, and witnessed the cruel, degrading corporal
punishments he inflicted upon them, while his eyes were speedily
opened to his father's addiction to drinking, gambling, and debauchery.
These experiences would most certainly have demoralised and
depraved his childish mind had it not been for the powerful influence
the refined and cultured mother had from the first exercised upon her
son. The contrast between his parents was so startling that it could not
fail to awaken the better side of the child's nature, and to imbue him
with pure and healthy notions of the truer and higher ideals of humanity.
In his poetical works of later years Nekrassov repeatedly returns to and
dwells upon the memory